Wix ADI | Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami Launches Artificial Design Intelligence

Well, first, let me thank you all for taking the time to join us here today. It's a very exciting day for us. We're going to be sharing with you the release of a product that we've been working on for the past two years. A product that we believe is radically going to change the way people do design on the Internet. But first, let me take a couple of minutes to talk about Wix. Founded in 2006 for allowing people to easily create stunning websites. Today we have 1200 employees, offices in five different countries, and over 86 million users. We went public in November 2013. At that time we had 32 million users, 550,000 subscriptions. Today, a little bit over than two years later, we have 86 million users, over 2 million subscriptions, and we've guided cash revenues for this year to $324 million. Thanks for our users. We are growing extremely fast. But we started with allowing everybody to build stunning websites. As time moves, we evolved. We learned that we have to do more than that. Our users need more. And if you think about, right, everybody talking about how to move small businesses into the cloud, but in reality what it mostly means is how to put your emails in the cloud and backup your computers, right? But our user already had a website and needed to do a lot more than that. So we went and built this small operation system to actually allow them to do a lot more. So we have a CRM that is currently managing over 300 million contacts for our users. A way to automate marketing campaigns, a way to manage invoices, inventory, and even a way to install third party applications that we did not build, built by other companies. All of that is now allowing our users to really take their business and move it online. And we believe that this is all fantastic, but this is just the beginning. We can do a lot more. Let me ask you, how much do you know about AI? Well, I know that personally, I've seen a lot of movies about it since I was growing, right? And from talking cars that can drive themselves all the way to fantastic things, I know that AI can play chess. It can win Jeopardy. It can, well, obviously play Go, which apparently is very, very hard. Okay, Even which I don't really know because I don't play go, right? And if you think about personally right, for me, if I want to find somebody who's better than me in chess, I just have to go to any park in New York and there are dozens of people that are better than me playing in playing chess. So when I think about right what can I do for me today? It's not a lot, not personally, but I know it's coming, right? It will be happening probably pretty soon. And we've been thinking a lot about what we can do with it. You know, the essence of design is always in nature, right? Look at all those beautiful things. And nature has managed to do them all with just one formula. And the quest of how to take design and explain to mathematics is something that humankind have been working on for 4,000 years, right? And we're very good at analyzing why something is pretty. But to use the same mathematics to build something that is pretty, right? To reverse the process is something that we are not able to do. And we can see this quest starting from the old Greeks all the way to Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, all the way to today. Let's take for example something that, well, from current TED lectures about AI creating art. So this is the result, right? And you can see actually it's pretty creative, right? It's very creative, but I wouldn't want that in my living room, right? It's kind of ugly, right? To be fair. And creating something that our mind perceive as pretty, it's really hard because the computer or the algorithm have to understand why the human mind will look at something and say, wow, it has harmony, it has balance, okay? And that's much harder than solving a mathematical equation. Let me explain to you why this is so important for us. So this is an example of Awake's website and if you look at it, it's beautiful, right? It's not just beautiful, that is so important actually the way that it works is that the fact that it looks great makes the product look great. When we look at a website like that, we actually trust the brand. We feel more connected to the products that are being sold here. And for us at wix, this is important because this makes our customers business better, right? And every morning I wake up and I look at WIX users websites and I'm very proud because they look great and I know how hard it is to make something that looks that good. I'm the CEO of wix and I can't design anything that looks that good. I don't have the skill set. But if I had a coffee store, a coffee shop, I would love to have my business presented like that. That's great, that's fantastic. Now we've been thinking about it. How can we ensure that all of our users will have design that look that good, that great? And we kind of realized, so we think about it for two Years. And we kind of realize there are two options. One is to teach all of our users to be master designers. And that's kind of like teaching them to be master chefs or master ballerinas. You all agree, right? It's a bit tricky. And the other option was to create this radical new technology that will change the way you do design, that will actually do it for you. And we had a large team working on exactly that for the last two years. And it is my pleasure to say today that we have done it. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this experience with you and to present you with the WIX ADI Artificial Design Intelligence. The first AI that can design.

Wix adi, the first ever AI that can design.

Sam. So after 4000 years long quest, for the first time in history there is an AI that can design. It is the power of a billion designs with a click. Just think about it. Billion design. You can switch between them with one click. All of the sites that you've seen here have been designed by artificial intelligence. They show the brand, they show the right colors to put your products out there without any human touch. Completely automatic. And this is really the power of billions of designs with a click. And if you look at them, right, they're all unique. They all are built around the user content. And I know that I would love to have one of those for my business, right? And this is a radical change in what computers can do. Let me show you how it works. So if you think about it, right, if this is a page, this is what a human designer would do, right? It will start by placing small things inside, aligning them, and then we'll start to create the whole composition of the page. Now start playing with the color and adjust the proportions, right? And a lot of it is derived from understanding of the context of the context of what is here. These are team members, and that's actually the product, and this is the actual things we sell. So all of that is taking right automatically in our mind, just running around and we know, wow, this is a good page. And then we measure how effective is that, right? So that's what a good designer do. Let me show you what we are doing. And it's an oversimplification, of course, of the algorithm, but let me try and explain it anyway. So the first thing we do is we build what we call structures. Okay? So what are structures? Think about it. You have text, an image and a title, right? So you can place them in many different structures. You can place the title here. The Text here and the picture here. You probably want to do the title subtitle and then the image, right? But there's many, many combinations and all of those have been built here. So it's built actually millions of combinations. All of those are going into what we call human understood filter. A lot of the structures make mathematical sense, but when a human will look at them, say, well, it doesn't make sense. I don't understand what's going on. So this human filter actually just removes all of them and leave us with something that humans will look at and say, wow, I understand what's going on. All of this is actually going to this process, this process actually inject the actual content into those structures and then measure how it looks and how much space we need. All of this is then injected into something that we call the designer. So the designer take all of that and now it's starting to, well, create balance. It creates spacing, it changed the size of the fonts, it aligns things correctly. So in a way that we will look at it and say, okay, this actually looks pretty. Now of that. All those design solutions go into what we call the color fitting part. The color fitting part. Well, it takes colors and match them together, but it's a bit more complex than that because it also has to make sure that if we have a background and put some things on the background, that the contrast between the background to each element and each element to the other one around him is such that we'd actually see them. So it's a bit more tricky than just setting up colors. This goes into what we call the section builder, which take all of the structure and then build sections with it. And then it goes to the page optimizer, which build complete pages from that. Those pages are then going into this ranking algorithm which says, well, how good do they look and how effective they are? And the results of that is then being fed into the last layer, which is the part where we present the user with the different options. So that's pretty much the algorithm. Let me show you a bit on how it looks behind the scene. Again, this is really simplification. So these are the structures, right? And there are many structures that you can see, and you can see here with three elements. Compiler generated about a thousand. And that goes to the human filter, which will remove the things that don't make sense for us as humans. And then that will go into what we call measure and fit, where we actually start to play with that and get the right sizes. And then this is going to what we call the designer algorithm and then the coloring layer. So now we have really nice piece of content from which we can build sections. So those sections are now being fed into something that will build pages. And now we have pages. So this is kind of like the process, right? So we have a page and each element is now being the way it rotates them and actually measures those pages. So this is how. Well again, simplification of how the magic is. But you saw how many options are there. The possibilities are really almost endless. And now what I want to show you. So we show how the, how the technology works, but why don't I show the actual system? We're moving to a real demo of the system and we're going to start building website. Ronnie here, if you can see, she's going to help me. She's going to be on the keyboard, okay. And we're going to build a website today for Jane. Jane is a physical trainer from New York and she's been working for a while, so. So there's a lot of information on Jane on the Internet. And the ADI system is actually going to use that information, collect it and start building a website for Jane. So warning please. Now this is a live system, right, which is still in beta. So. And this is the part where the ADI system will actually go and start collecting all the available information from the Internet about gen and we'll confirm that, well, it found the right chain. And now this whole process that you seen before is happening in the background, right? So this algorithm is running and doing all of that magic in order to create all the different possibilities. And now there's one question which is like, well, what kind of set of colors do you like? It can always be changed later. And now if you look at it, right, and Ronnie, no hands, right, for a minute, this is the ADI system building a website completely automatic. So this is a complete website, right, Built without human Dutch, right? And if you look at it, right, well, it actually looks great, right? And it's built around chains content. There's one like that. It only it's. There's no other website that is similar to it. And that's the magic. It really is unique and it works with mobile, of course. And the other amazing thing is that, right, this is not just a static website, it's actually functional. She said she wants booking, so she has a booking engine here. She can immediately actually start taking appointments, right? And people can actually schedule with Jane trainings and that. All of that done. This fantastic website, a complete system that she can really Use for her own business, done without any human touch, completely automatic. Now let's say that Jen actually said, well I do want to change stuff, right? Can I? Well the answer is, of course the ADI system is building a lot of different options for her to go and choose and with a click she can replace parts of the website and have them look different. There's a lot of levels here and a lot of flexibility in what you can do. Let's say she actually want to go and add a video, right? So we looked on the Internet and we actually found there is a video of Jane and that is already available again with a click. She don't have to know how to do anything beyond that. So this is a very, well, very basic example. Let's do something else. Let's say that Jane want to talk a bit more about herself. So she want to create a page, a new page on the website that talks about here. With one click she tells the ADI system, well use that to start a new page and then she can just go and add more and more parts. And now we have a fully functional website with another page that she just built on the spot and for not even one second. You know, this is what the ADI system is doing. It's so integrated that it's just magical. You click and it happens. Let's go and build another website. Let's start with doing something which is a bit more tricky and we're going to build a business, a business for a watch store and this one is a new business, right? So there's nothing on the Internet, there's nothing on the Internet for this business, right? So, So here the ADI system will not find anything on the Internet. What it's going to do, it's going to go and access our collection of images, text information and we have many, many tens of thousands of images, content prepared for our users. So again you can see the palette here has changed to fit something that is, well, better for a watch store than a personal trainer. And here you can see those are images that WIX is giving for free for our users. So you don't have to start with nothing, you're actually starting immediately and you're going to end up having a full blown website. Again. This is without hands, right? This is completely automatic. And I think it's kind of obvious to see, right? This already feels very different, it's very dark, very elegant. So, and what do you want to show us here? So we were able to guess a lot of the images, a lot of the text place here, things that are very relevant. There's one thing we can't really guess which is what kind of watches are you going to sell? Right. We don't know how to do that so. Right. So this is kind of like the place that one is going to actually add the products. I want to say something. What I see here is not some basic E commerce, okay. It's not a mini commerce solution. This is the WIX E commerce. It powers almost 300,000 stores, right. It works globally, it works in the U.S. it's really a fantastic full blown e commerce solution. And pretty much in. Well at three or four minutes we're actually going to have a full blown store. Again. Probably want to move those up, right? Those are probably going to be better if they're in the beginning of the store. And think about it, in what, four minutes we've built a full blown professional E commerce. And if you actually look at how good it looks. And of course just to be clear about it, this also works perfectly on mobile. You want to show that? That's for me. Amazing. So let's do one more. So we did. So let's this time build well an ice cream store. It's summer, it's really good to have ice cream in New York and let's do that. So again it's an existing business. So there's a lot of media already on the Internet that the business can use. And we've seen already, right how to build a website with one click. Jane's website, a personal trainer. We're now we've seen another one which is how to build a new business, E commerce. Right now we're going to take it just a bit more into the details and we're going to show some more things why we think this is such a radical change on how things are being done. One of the most important things for us when we were building this system was that we wanted to really allow users to have websites that are unique, that look different, that actually capture the spirit of their business. And you can see that in many different parts. And again like here the palate is already different. It's an ice cream business. We have 86 million websites on Wix. We understand that it should look different than a watch store, right? And you get all of that knowledge coming here and allowing us to build a perfect website for you. And. Again this is the ADI system. Do it completely automatic, right? There's no human touch here and you can see the section are different. Right? It's not the same. The feeling is different. This kind of looks like an ice cream store. Well, If you can show that. So. Think of it. We had one block which was very powerful and now which was more elegant. And now we have this which is. And what I want to show you here. Well, you know, winter in New York is a really. Oh, summer in New York is a really good place to sell ice creams. Right. And again you can change the designs, whatever you choose. But what happened right when winter is coming, right? And that when it happens in New York, it's very chilly, nobody wants ice cream. So this business, maybe they want to change and move to become a chocolate store. Right. So let's see how they can do that. So again, the ADI system, when it was looking on their content on the Internet, it found they have ice creams and chocolates and well, let's see how long it took only to actually change the complete look of this website to be. And the one thing that is really amazing here is that every click here activates the AI which helps you design more and more. And I'm going to show more details about it in a few seconds. So we pretty much have a website. The colors still look a bit ice creamish and let's change that. Let's change the colors. So probably, well, you want to have something that is a bit more elegant for chocolate, right. And so choose one. And now the AI system is actually going and not just changing the colors, but we're changing the fonts to fit that. Okay. It's scaling everything perfectly. It's actually going and aligning all the spacing differently. So it's all done with a click. You can go in and tune it even farther. So let me show you. But let's zoom in one small detail here to show you how much is done in every click. So we have this piece of content, right. And we can choose various amount of designs and of course it's building more and more for you and it can learn even more and more designs. So it's going to be richer and richer as we go forward. But what happen if we remove the image so immediately it goes and redesign that for you? Right. You don't have to know and think about it. Right. It just looks natural. But all these design suggestions are now completely different. Right. Again completely automatic. And if you see on the left side, right. And if you add the image again, the system said, well, you probably prefer something that looks like that. So let me try and keep the design to be something that you seems to prefer. It actually knows what you're doing and it's placing it here. So as you move more and you work with it, it just feels more natural. It kind of knows what you want. So let me say again, thank you and we've been working really hard on that. We're super proud of it. We believe that it will allow all our users to build amazing website easily and it is the power of billions of designs with a click. Thank you.

Well, thank you Avishai. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. We're going to open up the room for a couple of questions. So please flag me and I will come get you. Questions.

As a journalist, I have friends who are web designers now. You made a big deal about no human touch. But if someone is a web designer can work with this and can add their own personal touch or is it strictly automatic one size fit?

No, no. You saw that she was always picking different options and actually a good designer can be super creative with it. So we believe that long term this is actually going to empower designers to do a lot more. And actually instead of working on how do I align the text here or how do I do this, actually focus on the design itself, on the art itself and making them a lot more powerful. All of this is also compatible completely with the WIX editor. Best editor in the galaxy. Right. So you can actually grab the website content that you built here, bring it to the editor and do anything you you want.

Have you switched to like a one deep page design with sections like, sort

of like strikingly so as you saw, Jen actually had it ended up having three pages. Right. She had the homepage and then she had a booking page and then she built another page for herself. So we found that in many cases a very long page with a lot of content has better conversion for our users. So not all the time depends on the business. The ADI system actually knows where it should go to one page, where it should go to many. But. And of course E commerce cannot be solved in one page. It's impossible. But where it's relevant, we think it's a better option.

Is ADI going to integrate analytics so based on how users are going to interact with the website, change the design in order to increase that.

Yes. And we actually thinking that learn to ADI system can actually continue to evolve the website for you in a way that will match conversion. It's actually technically something that we can do. We just want to feel that this is completely new. I don't think there is one single AI in the world that is going to be used on that scale. Right. And I Might be wrong, but, but as far as I know. And so we want to see how it, well, to test the waters and then see how much of this huge power we're going to be able to give our users. One of the things is actually align them to, well, allow the website to evolve naturally.

Any additional questions?

Sorry.

So we have some questions coming in from our live stream and my colleague will ask a few

question from online. How do you make sure every site is unique?

Well, as you saw it when we start Millennial Structures, when you add colors and you add fonts and you have the content of the user, it actually does create almost a billion possibilities in some cases, some cases even more than that. And we really use the user's content to design the website around it. So we really believe that with this system you can have so many different options that there's almost no chance that two sites will look the same. Probably a lot less likely than it is today.

We'll go with another question from online. So design trends are constantly changing. How does ADI adapt and, and stay on trend?

Well, that's a good question. So the thing about it is that it's a real AI, it learns. Right? So this is generation one. We taught a design that we think is current, but as design evolves, we can teach it more and more different designs. So in many ways we can actually just continue to teach it. New designs will just evolve. In fact, I believe that by version two or three, we'll probably start to invent new design trends. Okay. And that's going to be super interesting to see.

One final question. Does ADI replace the WIX editor?

Of course not. We think that they are both parts of something that is, that is a bigger thing. Right. And they're all both helping each other. And you can start with adi, move things to the WIX editor, add on top of that and work with them together. And as we move forward, we're actually going to see we're imagining them integrating more and more into each other to become again, one full solution.

We have time for one more question. That was actually my question. If the previously created sites with the editor could be integrated with this.

So at this moment, we're going to probably have a way for you to import your website in the system and then to export it back to the editor. So yes, but it's going to be a bit, not as smooth as we want, but very quickly it's going to be one system.